Since Harris’ work is imaginative and painted in interesting ways, this work is worth adding to collections of illustration art fans and those of painters in general.”– Art Contrarian Hugo Awards". World Science Fiction Society. Archived from the original on 6 September 2015 . Retrieved 20 April 2014.

Eventually, in 1970, Harris secured new premises for the drawings collection in Portman Square, next to Home House, by James Wyatt (as Eileen discovered) and Robert Adam, the home of the Courtauld Institute. There, in 1972, he opened the Heinz Gallery, an elegant installation designed by Alan Irvine and Stefan Buzás. (The fit-out was happily relocated in 2005 to the Irish Architectural Archive in Merrion Square, Dublin.) Energetic curatorship Titan Books has released another fabulous art book of a contemporary science fiction artist. The Art of John Harris, Beyond The Horizonis as beautiful as the images contained in it.”– Tor.com

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Although Harris’s interests were centred on the 18th century, the 64 Heinz exhibitions that preceded his retirement in 1986 were immensely wide-ranging, including Richard Norman Shaw, James Stirling, Giovanni Michelucci and Carlo Scarpa. But it is worth singling out Silent Cities (1977), curated by Gavin Stamp, on cemeteries of the Great War, a subject near to Harris’s heart, and the pioneering Eileen Gray (1973), curated by Alan Irvine. Thanks to Harris’s energetic curatorship the collection grew apace, and from 1969 to 1984 a model 18-volume catalogue was published, edited by Jill Lever, Harris himself contributing Inigo Jones and John Webb (1972) and Colin Campbell (1973). A collection of his work has been published by Cambridge-based publishing house Lutterworth Press in September 2018; this is the first time a collection of his work has been published. The book, titled Artist About Cambridge is a biographical look at Harris' work and how the city of Cambridge has changed over the past few decades. Harris first entered the public consciousness as the supreme self-declared 'country house snooper' in two electric and episodic memoirs, No Voice From The Hall (1998) and Echoing Voices (2002) John's painting of Spindizzy (an anti-gravity device), from James Blish's Cities in Flight omnibus Where's the coolest place that your job has taken you? John is a British artist who, inspired by mindfulness, has created stunning sci-fi art since the 1970s. This article originally appeared in ImagineFX magazine issue 112.

This is the perfect collection to adorn the coffee table of any science fiction fan.”– Geek Art Gallery This coffee table sized book is a treasure. Although ably introduced by John Scalzi and with commentary by Harris himself, the real joy of the book is the massive spreads, in full color, that allow the reader to examine in minute detail, sans text or markings, the images that have graced so many iconic covers. One of Harris’ best known pieces came from when he was invited by NASA to see an early morning shuttle launch in 1985. Harris remembers trying to photograph the moment of liftoff with his camera. But rather than capture the feeling of excitement, he felt that the lens introduced an unwanted separation between him and the event. It wasn’t until the shuttle took off that he put the camera down and looked at the light and color produced by the launch’s vapor exhaust. From 1959, partly thanks to Eileen, Harris was a regular transatlantic presence. Many drawings in the Yale Center for British Art bear witness to his acumen as an adviser to Paul Mellon and in 1987 his unsurpassed collection of country house guide books was acquired by the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, founded by his close friend Phyllis Lambert. His early travels bore fruit in 1971 with the publication of a mighty catalogue of British architectural drawings in no fewer than 42 US collections, public and private, from Connecticut to California. And in Moving Rooms (2007) he chronicled the taste for and trade in panelling and other architectural remnants, which was behind the cult of the museum “period room” and which involved much confusion and deception—irresistible grist for John’s detective skills. a b Adam Mann (2 May 2014). "Fantastic Sci-Fi Art Shows You a Beautiful, Bewildering Future". Wired . Retrieved 8 February 2015.

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The distinguished architectural historian John Harris, scion of a dynasty of upholsterers, spent his early years in a dim semi-detached house in suburban Cowley, on London’s western fringe. The rebellious child found solace in his bachelor Uncle Sid, whose passion for fishing, for archaeology and literature, and for exploring country estates was an inspiration. In 2010 Harris became a regular contributor to the exhibitions of the Symposium of Imaginative Realism (Illuxcon). He is survived by Jane and their three children, Emma, Mark and Jessica, and five grandchildren, and by seven of his siblings. He was born in the Bronx, New York, one of 12 children of James Harris, a grocery clerk, and his wife, Mary (nee Rowan). Originally wanting to be a pilot or an actor, John found his calling as a photographer after seeing Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955. He adopted as his professional name the double-barrelled Benton-Harris to make his surname more distinctive

Benton-Harris was a teacher and a visiting lecturer on photographic courses at a variety of institutions, including Trent Polytechnic (Nottingham Trent University) in the 70s, the School of Documentary Photography in Newport, south Wales in the 70s and 80s, and latterly the London College of Printing (later the London College of Communication, UAL). In 1987 he was appointed adjunct professor of photography at the University of Michigan. Other projects included Americans in Europe, exhibited at the Santa Fe Centre for Photography in 1983; and Children of the Troubles, shot in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. A good selection of his work from England and New York was published in Creative Camera Collection 5 in 1978, and he was supportive in the research for and the making of the 2019 film Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay, about the founder of Creative Camera magazine. Hugo Awards". World Science Fiction Society. Archived from the original on 7 May 2011 . Retrieved 19 April 2010.I start with an abstraction and I let the feelings coalesce into form,” said Harris. “And because I’m thinking in the context of science and science fiction, the forms that I find on the canvas end up relating to those ideas.” In 1984 I went to the States for the first time. That spring I'd had the privilege of meeting Arthur C Clarke in Sri Lanka, and there I met a friend of his, Freddie Durant III. Harris is one of the few commercial artists working today who dislikes the nature of computer enhanced art (he calls it a bloodless medium) yet he has produced some pieces in this manner. By taking the richly coloured roughness of his pastel sketches as starting points, so that the full bodied nature of his tangible pieces shines through, he develops them digitally by only a little. He is particularly fond of pastels as a medium, due to their hazy, atmospheric quality, which is, in fact, one of the key aspects of his art — the heightened sense of atmosphere his pictures evoke. His paintings are absolutely dripping with massive scale, temperature, atmospheric motion, “otherness”, a marriage of the alien and the recognizable, and far future antiquity. He provides a real aged quality to everything he paints. Everything feels old and lived in: ancient ships, xeno-archaeological remnants, etc. He provides just enough detail to spark your imagination, but he leaves the edges blurred, ambiguous and almost out of focus, so you have to fill in the mental blanks yourself. It all has a photographic feel to it, although no one would confuse his painting for photographs. How he manages to do this with a paintbrush is beyond me. It’s like he thinks through a lense and paints it with a brush. Just like reading a story, you meet the artwork halfway with your own imagination and fill in the blanks.